India Warns on ‘Silent Calls’ as Telecom Firms Roll Out Verified Caller Names to Curb Fraud

India’s telecom authorities have issued a fresh advisory highlighting how ordinary phone calls are increasingly being used as entry points for scams, even as a long-discussed caller identity system begins to take shape as a countermeasure.

For many users, the pattern is familiar: the phone rings, the call is picked up, and no one responds. According to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), these “silent calls” are intentional rather than technical faults.

Officials explain that such calls are designed to check whether a number is active. Once answered, the number is marked as live and becomes more valuable to fraud networks. It can then be circulated within scam databases and later targeted for phishing, impersonation or financial fraud. The DoT has advised users to block these numbers immediately and report them via the government’s Sanchar Saathi portal, which aims to gather public inputs to identify and disrupt telecom abuse.

The warning signals a broader concern within the government: many frauds today begin not with advanced hacking tools, but with simple behavioural triggers that rely on users answering calls out of habit.

At the same time, India’s telecom ecosystem is seeing a gradual but significant change. Reliance Jio has started deploying Calle

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